Friday, 10 March 2017

Lenin & the Spiritual Bourgeois

I wrote in the Lenin post recently of how despite the Bolshevik love of terms & policies like "class-war", Lenin was of course himself not of the blessed proletarian class but in his background very much of the educated middle-class. Someone might retort, yes, in his social background he was a bourgeois but spiritually he was a proletarian. Of course to be a bourgeois in a spiritual sense can imply to be purely concerned with one's comfort and the lack of any higher idealism & these can be genuine criticisms or observations; however spending one's time in libraries, forming theories of the evolution of the past in to the present and the projected future, and ensuring it evolves in the direction it should evolve . . . well, in a different sense this is also bourgeois to the very core. A proletarian's time by contrast is filled with work and necessities. He exists on the level of primal biological necessities. This intellectual man in the library with his head full of abstractions is by contrast a kind of pure bourgeois, at a total remove from biological necessity and its reality, and his propulsion into the world of physical reality is a colossal urge to force all this chaotic external world to conform to these creations and imaginings of the intellect. Where the more normal scenario is the bourgeois having immersed himself in the academic world then goes onto live his lukewarm life - which is itself one could say the bourgeois essence, still in all walks of life there are people who push things to extreme, and people like Lenin are by contrast to the great average, the bourgeois pushed to the extreme.